Monday, November 20, 2017

The malware research team in the UAB Computer Forensics Research Lab is widening its horizon and is always on the look out for new malware families. While researching new malware families, Arsh Arora, Ph.D. Candidate at UAB, found some chatter about the new banking trojan IcedId. Although ransomware is the most discussed malware in the press for many financial institutions the most feared malware type is the Banking Trojan. The objective of most banking trojans is to steal banking credentials and eventually steal the money from account holders.

IcedID Banking Trojan

IBM X-Force discovered a new banking trojan IcedID that was first detected in September 2017. It is known as modified version of the Zeus Trojan. The following trojan spreads by Emotet worm which is able to spread from machine to machine inside a network via weak administrator passwords.

One of our malware research team members, Shawn Sharp, decided to dig into this malware. IBM had already provided a detailed explanation of the infection part, so we decided to take a different approach and focused on analyzing the web injects on a number of websites.

Virus Total Detection - 49/67. The sad part is that only 1 of the 49 detection named it IcedID, which commonly happens when marketing departments name malware. (The only company to call it IcedID was ALYac, the anti-virus product from ESTSecurity Corp in Seoul, Korea. ESET, Microsoft, and TrendMicro all call this a sample of Fareit malware.)

When Shawn launched the process, it didn't trigger on its own but a browser had to be launched to activate the banking trojan.

Fig. 1: Activation of Banking Trojan IcedID

Once the trojan was activated, following financial institution strings were found in the memory of the running sample when checked through Process Hacker.

When we visited a few of these websites and provided them fake credentials, the webinject process modifies the user experience by asking the website visitor for extra details. It is noteworthy that these changes to the page happen in browser memory, meaning that the "https:" and "Secure" labels are still present, even though the page has been altered.

Amazon -

Fig. 2: Amazon Web-Inject asking for card number

Although we really are at Amazon.com, the malware is causing our browser to ask us for the details of our credit card!

Chase

Fig. 3: Chase Web-Inject asking for additional details

The malware makes Chase's website appear to ask us for not only our Card Number and Expiration Date, but also our CVV and PIN!

Citi

Fig. 4: Citi Web-Inject asking for additional details

Machines infected with IcedID will also ask for these details after a login attempt at Citi.com!

Discover

Fig. 5: Discover Web-Inject asking for additional details

The Discover.com website asks for card details, but also our Date of Birth and the last four digits of our Social Security Number!

Researchers will be diving in deep and try to reverse engineer the binary for additional information. Stay tuned for more updates. In the meantime, if you hear of a friend complaining that their bank is asking them for too much information -- it may mean that they are infected with malware!